March 7, 2007

Tomorrow, eBay will start paying eBay affiliate money to sellers for referring buyers to their own listings. This is a postive sign that eBay is focused on the health of the eBay ecosystem. Before this announcement, I felt eBay was focused on shareholders rather than the marketplace.

eBay sellers can now recoup 40% or more of their final value fees. Here are some affiliate figures from my Commission Junction report on Feb. 11:

eBay Purchase

Final Value Fee

Commission

$7.99 Auction

$0.86

$0.34

$24.99 Auction

$2.11

$0.84

$76.01 Auction

$4.46

$1.78

$9.99 Auction

$1.19

$0.48

$89.99 Fixed Price

$4.09

$1.64

There is additional information available to the affiliate such as: eBay item ID, dates, links used, etc… This helps the affiliate understand which affiliate links work for them.

The first step to getting your final value fees back is to sign up on Commission Junction. Then you can either use the CJ banners or design your own custom landing pages to your eBay items.

The trickiest part of creating the landing pages is URL encoding the links. The affiliate link has two parts, the link to the eBay affiliate tracking server (named Rover) and the URL encoded eBay landing page (like mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com). There is a forum and some tools on eBay to help you.

It will be interesting to see how the eBay solutions providers as well as the affiliate programs like Big Crumbs utilize this change.